Fellows & Staff

Dr Timothy Michael

Tutorial Fellow in English Literature

I have been a Fellow of Lincoln College since 2013, when I moved to Oxford from the United States. After undergraduate studies in English and philosophy at New York University (BA ’02) and doctoral research at Harvard University (PhD ’09), I spent three years as a member of the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago.

My research rests broadly at the intersection of literary and intellectual history in the long eighteenth century. My first book, British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason (JHUP 2016), examines how figures such as Burke, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley responded to a set of questions that very much remain with us: What role should reason play in the creation of a free and just society? Can we claim certain knowledge in a field as complex as politics? How can the cause of political rationalism be advanced when it is seen, at least by some, as having blood on its hands? The argument of the book is that much of the literature at the heart of British Romanticism is a trial, or a critique, of reason in its political capacities and a test of the kinds of knowledge available to it. My current project, Disciplining English: Philology, Rhetoric, and the Birth of Philosophical Criticism, 1688-1800, examines how developments in rhetorical and literary theory of the long eighteenth century gave rise to the institution of criticism as we know it.

At Lincoln, I have the pleasure of teaching literature in English from 1760 to the present. This consists mainly in offering classes and tutorials for the ‘Romantic’ (1760-1830), ‘Victorian’ (1830-1910), and ‘Modern’ (1910-present) papers. I also give a number of lectures on Romantic literature throughout the year.

At the postgraduate level, I offer MSt courses in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and supervise DPhil students working in those areas.

For 2015-17, I am co-convenor of the 1700-1830 MSt strand in the English Faculty.

Research Interests:

British Romanticism; eighteenth-century literature and philosophy; aesthetics; political theory; philology and the philosophy of language; history of literary criticism and theory.

Recent Publications:

British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason, JHUP, 2016

‘Reason in the Court of Justice: The High Arguments of Wordsworth and Kant’, Romanticism and Knowledge, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, September 2015

‘Knowledge and Power in The Convention of Cintra,’ The Convention of Cintra. Edited by W. J. B. Owen, with a Preface by Richard Gravil and Essays by Simon Bainbridge, David Bromwich, Timothy Michael and Patrick Vincent, Tirril, 2010

‘Coleridge, Hume, and the Principles of Political Knowledge,’ Studies in Romanticism, Fall 2010